No more torrents will help more content to be shared, render "copyright watchdogs" more toothless

The Pirate Bay has long been synonymous with one thing -- torrents. The world's largest torrent site has had more than its fair share of legal headaches [1][2][3] over the years for promoting the ubiquitous file-sharing mechanism. Consequentially on Feb. 29 in will be taking what on the surface appears to be a mind-blowing move -- deleting all torrents hosted directly on the site, which are being actively shared by more than 10 individuals.

But in reality this move is not as mind-blowing and drastic a departure from the site's operational model as some are thinking/hoping/fearing.

The site will continue to host the content, where possible, via magnet links. All new content will be hosted via magnetic links.

The Pirate Bay can now be compressed to a 90 MB torrent-free site, for easy hosting. Under the new scheme scores of new users will be able to host free proxy servers for The Pirate Bay, helping it escape takedown attempts, local firewalls, or ISP restrictions.

At the same time The Pirate Bay washes its hands of any of the actual process of file-sharing. It is simply hosting magnet links -- links to torrents which share the same unique hash value. In that regard, thousands, if not millions of users will be privately hosting the scores of torrents that make up The Pirate Bay users worldwide know and love.

And it will be far harder for lawyers and regulators to pin wrongdoing on The Pirate Bay -- assuming that the members of the international judicial committee understand how the technology works and are willing to give a fair trial, at least. In short, magnet links are the future of filesharing and The Pirate Bay's decision to force their adoption is a sound one in terms of its future.

In essence it will be impossible for the RIAA or MPAA to put millions of Americans in prison or fine them. So ultimately, magnet links and other new technologies may force the RIAA, MPAA, and government to abandon traditional enforcement of file-sharing. Thus the groups' long-standing dream of taking down The Pirate Bay's torrents has just become their worst nightmare.

It should be interesting how the self-proclaimed "anti-piracy" advocates by day, for-profit pirates by night globally react to this new technological marvel.

i don't really think it's fair to say that people pirate because of lack of availability on stream. I'd say the majority of pirates are simply people not interested in buying the product in the first place, then you have another category created by the insanely intrusive DRM and advertising schemes movie studios have been implementing and looking for an easier solution, and to a certain degree people who just don't feel like paying even if they want the actual product.

I personally agree that there should be better methods of preview, but it's hard to do with video games. Games rely heavily on the launch sales, since that's when they get the most attention and subsequent shelf space. Games are also created using a lot of redundant information distributed throughout the disc. To get a demo you'd either need an entirely separate demo build or a slice of the actual game (which would require most, if not all of the game's assets to be installed). It's much easier said than done. You can't really resale a game multiple times like you can with a movie, going from theaters to blu-ray to PPV to licensing etc.